Many people today suffer from what is often broadly
referred to as "heavy metal toxicity." The most
common source of toxicity is mercury from dental fillings. When
the so-called "silver" fillings are put in the teeth,
they are roughly 49-53% mercury. The filling is an amalgam
that contains some silver and other metals as well as what is for
some people a lethal amount of mercury. To determine the extent
of possible mercury poisoning, studies were conducted on sheep. The
fillings were removed after six months and found to contain only
about a fifth of the mercury that was present when the fillings
were first put into the teeth. The rest of the mercury had
leeched and was found in significant concentrations in the brain
and small intestines, though the liver and kidneys and lungs were
also repositories for the mercury.

Since 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency
has required dentists to treat amalgam fillings that are removed
as hazardous waste. However, the various regulatory agencies
as well as American Dental Association insist that putting “hazardous
waste” in the mouth is safe.

Warnings

I have known about the dangers of heavy metal
poisoning for many years. My grandfather was a metallurgist
and warned our family to avoid mercury and never to use aluminum. My
mother had only porcelain dental restorations but for some reason
the same precautions had not been used with me . . . despite the
admonitions to avoid amalgams as well as aluminum cookware and
even food packaged in aluminum. The studies supporting my
grandfather's knowledge began to appear thirty or more years ago,
and, in some countries, such as Germany and Sweden, the governments
are paying for mercury removal. However, in the United States,
dentists in some states still face prison sentences for suggesting
to their patients that removal of amalgams might improve their
health. Amalgams can, of course, always be replaced for cosmetic
reasons.

Duluth, Minnesota, was the first to prohibit
mercury amalgams and California disbanded the dental board with
instructions to dentists to get their acts together. Meanwhile,
the legislature passed some sensible laws restricting the use of
mercury restorations.

Medical Issues

Insistence on the safety of amalgams is not just
nonsense, but criminally irresponsible. For many people, mercury
is a very significant cause of ill health. Symptoms range
from muscle spasms to severe neurological problems such as paralysis
and memory loss. For years, many people have been going through
the quite expensive procedure of having amalgam fillings replaced
with more stable and less toxic dental materials, often having
biocompatibility tests performed before choosing the restoration
material. To the surprise of the uninitiated, there are actually
about 200 choices of materials even though most dentists offer
only 2-6 options.

Once the amalgams are removed, many patients
follow up with some form of chelation therapy, this ranging from
somewhat expensive and often stressful reliance on intravenous
or intramuscular methods that are augmented by vitamins and sometimes
other supplements to far less costly oral chelation, either supervised
by a dentist or doctor or self-prescribed.

Chelation

Chelation methods became an integral
part of many holistic medical practices. Special training
is required for the intravenous protocols, and all methods are
best carried out in conjunction with baseline and periodic tests
of the presence of toxic metals in hair, urine, blood, and sometimes
also stool specimens.

Until recently, all chelation was
a formal medical procedure, usually supervised by a doctor but
sometimes carried out by dentists. Then, a researcher named Dr.
Yoshiaki Omuradiscovered
that some patients excreted more toxic metals after consuming a
Chinese soup containing cilantro, the leafy part of coriander,
an herb whose seed is a familiar culinary spice in African, Middle
Eastern, and Indian cooking. In China, cilantro is called
Chinese parsley, and it is used mainly as a garnish rather than
seasoning. Cilantro is also common in some Italian dishes. It
is a member of the carrot family and has a distinct taste that
most people either love or hate.

I first heard about the chelating
properties of cilantro back in my Santa Fe days; and, fortunately,
I happen to like the taste of cilantro. I was eager to
make a product that was "fresh," not just another tincture. Obviously,
people can eat cilantro, make pesto of it, juice it, and ingest
it however they choose; but my experience is that most people
are more compliant when the method of delivery of the herb is
simple. So, we made an extract using fresh juice from organically
grown cilantro. The result was dazzling, a gem quality luminescent
green liquid that remains stable due to the alcohol.

Advice from Dentists

Years ago, I began having my dental
work done by environmental dentists. The first dentist retired
from his practice on the advice of his personal physician who said
that swelling in his brain had become life
threatening.

When a patient has mercury amalgam
fillings removed by a properly trained dentist, the patient is
somewhat protected by a rubber dam that reduces the risk of swallowing
the dental materials that are removed. The problem is that
mercury is so volatile that the vapor is absorbed by both patient
and dentist, but dentists tend to suffer more than patients from
this vapor. To put this in perspective, consider that the
vapor can be so dangerous that sharing a sauna with someone with
a mouth full of mercury can be toxic for everyone in the sauna.

The dentist who took over the practice
from the retiring pioneer discussed a number of cases of spontaneous
remissions of cancer following mercury amalgam removal. This
said, he advised me not to bother with the mercury in my mouth. Stubborn
as I am, I insisted he do one quadrant. He said, "Ingrid,
if it ain't broke, don't fix it." What I didn't know
at the time was that I am personally more sensitive to composite
fillings than mercury. They are estrogenic and the lidocaine
is a carcinogen so I eventually realized that people with cavities
and/or mercury-sensitivity are caught between a rock and a hard
place. This said, there are biocompatility tests that help people to determine
which substances are most suitable for them, but all these tests
do raise the cost of dental work.

I came to regret the initial round
of mercury removal, not that I missed the mercury but the composites
have not been a dream either. Moreover, they proved neither
durable nor satisfactory. Over the last few years, I have
had all the mercury and composites replaced with Cerec dental restorations. I
believe these are excellent providing a proper bonding agent is
used, some bonding agents are more estrogenic than others. It might
also be noted that there are several sources for the Cerec restoration
materials and they might not all be free of contaminants.

Experimentation

In 1995, I was bitten all up and
down my leg by a lady spider. I was paralyzed for nearly
a year by the bacterial neurotoxin and have since that time shown
more of the classic symptoms of sensitivity to metal poisoning. I
thus decided to try the first batch of cilantro on myself. The
results were dramatic: my brain felt like it was "spewing." Sorry,
I can't find a better word. On a purely physical level, I
felt tingling sensations. In my dreams, I saw spurting, like
an ink jet printer. My hair started to feel like it was coated
with something awful and the smell was ghastly.

The tingling sensations lasted about
five days and then subsided markedly. However, I had some muscle
cramps so decided to add trace minerals and seaweed to my regime. I
was also extremely careful to drink a lot of fluids, including
my own delicious tea that I made to support
lymphatic drainage. During the first two weeks, my skin felt
like it was coated with slime. I took baths in Epsom salts
and found an oil slick on the surface of the water and residue
on the tub that looked like gray sand, exactly what yet another
dentist told me to expect. He said his wife actually had
little dots percolating up through her skin that looked like tiny
beads.

I do not think this kind of chelation
is for the faint of heart, but the nasty odors and residues on
the hair and skin diminished after about three weeks. I then went
back to the drawing board and have learned a lot more since 1995.

Should You Use This Product?

It is never possible nor wise to
speak for another, but people who are suffering from neurological
complaints, including memory issues, might consider having a hair
and/or blood analysis done to determine the extent to which they
might have metals in their system. When the metals are present,
they tend to interfere with synaptic responses. They also
aggravate the tendency towards free radical
toxicity which, in turn, affects many other physiological functions,
most especially in the intestines. Perhaps most important of all, metal toxicity impairs immunity.

If one were to embark on a program
of heavy metal chelation, it would probably be wise to contact
a health care practitioner who is experienced with the subject
of metal toxicity as well as removal of the substances. If
wanting to do this on one's own, it would be sensible to support
the use of cilantro with formulae that aid the functioning of the
liver, kidneys, and eliminatory channels as well as to anticipate
some fairly extreme ion exchanges between minerals in the body
so that electrolyte balance and trace
mineral balance is temporarily disturbed. Also, everyone
with whom I have discussed this protocol insists that mega amounts
of chlorella are a must when chelating metals from the body. According
to some authorities, the cilantro mobilizes the mercury (and lead
and aluminum) but the chlorella bonds with it and transports it
out of the body. I have created a list of adjunctive products that
I think will support the use of cilantro and would appreciate feedback
from others, especially from those who are willing to do baseline
hair analysis followed by repeat testing in three and six months.

Speculation

Based on the feedback I have been receiving on
cilantro use, it seems possible, well probable, that when metals
are removed from the body, both parasite
and fungal populations increase. Those with candida
albicans should be especially aware of this matter. It
is an important enough concern that those intending to chelate
metals from their body might consider the merits of an evaluation
of the presence of fungi and/or parasitesbefore jumping
feet first into a toxic metal removal program. In fact, I would
go so far as to suggest that most people reduce the fungal load
and then do a parasite cleanse prior to chelating the toxic metals.
It should probably also be noted that many pharmaceutical parasiticides
contain serious amounts of toxic metals, including arsenic. This
is worth mentioning because those who already suffer from mercury,
lead, or aluminum toxicity may have less tolerance for additional
toxins.

It is my belief that the metal toxins in the body
tend to hold parasite populations in check, in much the same way
that a pharmacological compound would kill off parasites in the
blood and elsewhere. Since the antiparasite pharmaceutical medicines
may contain some of the same contaminants as found in amalgams
and vaccines, another major source of mercury toxicity, natural
strategies almost imperative for some persons.

Summary

Since first posting this article, many patients
and practitioners have contacted me about mercury chelation and
specific problems thought to be associated with heavy metal poisoning.
These include everything from childhood autism to
Alzheimer's disease as well as many cases of neurological degeneration
and environmental sensitivity. While some people maintain that
total chelation of all toxic metals can be completed in three weeks,
my experience is that the process generally takes considerably
longer, even years. Progress tends to occur in spurts so there
may be periods in which very rapid improvement is noted, such as
reduction in allergic reactions to food; however, there could also
be stretches in which there are relatively few observable differences.
There can be some hair raising moments when the metals are mobilized
but not yet removed. Adequate mental and emotional preparation
definitely helps people to make better judgments about the safety
of their chelation efforts. Allowing the chelation to proceed
at a pace the body can tolerate is another word to the wise!

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 1995,
2003, 2006, 2007
Revised 2007

Postscript 2006

There is a new theory that many
will find interesting. In hair analysis studies done of children,
high mercury counts did not correlate at all with autism. It
was assumed that most small children had had similar levels of
exposure to toxic metals and that higher levels of toxic metals
would be found in the children with attention deficit disorder
and autism. In fact, the findings did not support this expectation
so they came up with a theory of good excreters and bad excreters. People
who are able to eliminate the toxic metals are healthier than those
who are for one reason or another less efficient excreters.

This notion appealed immensely
to me because it suggests there are significant metabolic and other
differences between individuals so some people would be more easily
compromised by exposure to toxins than others.

Secondly, in my own work in Europe,
I found that patients with amalgams were suffering from a severe
burden on their immune systems because the white blood cells were
actually attacking cations but dying in the process. Not
only did this incapacitate the white blood cells and prevent them
from addressing other problems; it meant the plasma was full of
dead white bloods cells.

*The material provided on this
site is for informational purposes only. The author is not a medical
doctor. The statements made represent the author's personal opinions
and are not intended to replace the services of health care professionals.
The content and products discussed have not been evaluated by the
Food and Drug Administration. The information on this page and
the products available on this site are not intended to diagnose,
treat, cure, or prevent any disease.